Hillary Carroll-Curtis v Barack Donat-Poitier? Not to this Writer

It is unlikely we will ever know the percentage of voters who chose Hillary Clinton because of her gender or Barack Obama for his race. I would like to think those numbers were small.

They certainly did not factor into my vote. Nor yours, I hope.

To me, the Clinton-Obama race, while grand cinema, was neither Tony Curtis and Sidney Poitier in The Defiant Ones nor Robert Donat and Madeleine Carroll in The 39 Steps. But it was a contest between two nimble actors intent on convincing me (us?) of the depth of their sincerity toward and the likelihood that they will solve the complex problems that the next occupant of the White House must face.

In the final analysis, the decision boiled down to which candidate gave the more credible performance. And stepping into the polling booth was the political equivalent of members of Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' members selecting which nominee should go home with the statuette.

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When she was on her game, I thought Hillary Clinton was easily the more convincing of the two candidates; her problem, however, was that more voters simply couldn't distinguish between those times when she was sincere and when she was being a politician than was the case for her challenger. In other words, she failed the "convince test" more times than he did.

And Senator John Edwards failed it before her.
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Has anyone given any thought to the possibility (likelihood?) that if Senator Clinton is Senator Obama's vice-presidential running mate, and if they should get elected, the White House battles between Mrs. Clinton and Michelle Obama (Yale Law v Harvard Law, incidentally, with Governor Jack Stanton [to continue the movie metaphor] as referee) would be the stuff that legends are made of. The wily veteran, filled with street savvy and the scars to prove it, versus the youthful champion, intelligent, filled with abundant stamina, protective of her husband and, just maybe, with her eye on his office.

If Senator Obama is seriously considering Senator Clinton as his running mate, somewhere in Fortress McCain I suspect the good senator from Arizona is admonishing his aides to refrain from commenting on the issue with this quote from Napoleon: "Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake."